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ASUS Confirms DDR3 1.5-1.65v Works With Skylake

Budget shoppers looking for the best bang per buck will soon have more options opened up to them. According to ASUS, Skylake CPUs and their accompanying Z170 and other 100 series motherboards can support DRR3 running at 1.5 or 1.65 volts. There has been some confusion as to whether or not DDR3 would work as Intel has only talked about DDR4 and DDR3L which use 1.2v and 1.35v respectively.

For those on a budget, it means they will be able to reuse their DDR3 with the new lineup. This means with the right motherboards, budget users can avoid shelling out an extra $80+ for new DDR4 ram. Given that DDR3 performs better with Skylake unless you have high-speed and low-latency DDR4, there isn’t much performance left on the table by not using the newer ram. DDR4 also still costs a bit more than DDR3 for similar speeds, capacity and latency.

For those that might consider upgrading to DDR4 though and want a motherboard to support that, there are some options. The most notable one is the Hi-Fi H170Z3 from Biostar which has 2 DDR4 and 2 DDR3 slots. Given that DDR4 supports 16GB DIMMs, it’s possible to put up to 16GB of DDR3 in now and later upgrade to a max of 32GB of high-speed low-latency DDR4 ram. Hopefully, there will be more boards from other firms for dual DDR3/DDR4 support.